Bendigo, the town that became scared of trees

The tragic death of a young child killed by a falling tree branch has left the leafy town of Bendigo on edge. The council says there is a one in five million chance of being killed by a tree, so should people be scared? Ann Jones investigates.

It is December 30, 2013, the middle of the desiccated, oppressive lull that southern Australia experiences between Christmas and New Year.

A mother and her child take an afternoon walk. They move along the neat paths of Rosalind Park in Bendigo, through a traditional, manicured garden of lawn and trees.

There is a loud crack and, within seconds, a branch falls. The mother lies pinned to the ground and her four-year old daughter is killed.

The outpouring of grief from the community was immediate, immense and sustained.

In the days, weeks and months that followed, the grief at the child’s death manifested in many ways—in donations, cards and flowers in the park, but also in people’s realisation that the large, mature trees they had previously loved and cherished could easily transform into killers.

Bendigo is 150 kilometres north west of Melbourne and the centre of town is laid out around a creek and along rock-seam ridges that might lead to gold.

In fact, the whole appearance of the town reflects the influence of the Gold Rush, with fine heritage facades and as many sturdy bank buildings as you could possibly want in a regional centre.

Ironically, the Gold Rush also led to the streets of the town centre being lined and dotted with mature trees, because during peak mining times trees were almost completely removed from the landscape.

‘In the midst of the mining boom, through the 1850s, 1860s and early 1870s, it was absolutely treeless. It was a desolate place that’s for sure,’ says local arborist Mitch Kemp.

‘People really recognised how important trees were once they were gone.’

It was Baron Sir Ferdinand Jacob Heinrich von Mueller, state botanist at the time, who encouraged the planting of both native and exotic species at a time when Bendigo was sorely in need of trees.

Kemp says the lines of street trees started to get put in around 1873, and given the lack of reticulated water and the relative lawlessness of the town at the time, he is astounded at their success.

‘You’ll more consistently see a species of trees that has been successful, that are all around the same age, from those earlier plantings than perhaps the later plantings.’

These established trees, as well as the large swathes of bushland close to town in national parks, regional parks and state forests, have informed Bendigo’s self-image.

‘Bendigo is known as, I’m not sure how widely, but we know it as a “city in the forest” and it is an extremely appropriate analysis of Bendigo,’ says Darren Fuzzard, director of presentations and assets at the City of Greater Bendigo Council.

‘The thing that we hear almost the most about from the public is that they love the presentation of the city and they want us to maintain it.’

However, after the accident the public view of mature trees changed. Since January, the council has received an unprecedented number of requests to inspect trees.

There have been 1029 total requests for tree maintenance from members of the public this year—double the same period in 2013.

‘Paranoia—that’s what came through the media to me,’ says Ros Woodburn, a landscape architect from Bendigo.

‘It’s very sad to lose a life, but since then I’ve heard that arborists are being called left right and centre to chop down trees, parents of young children are just paranoid about the trees in their backyard, and I think it’s similar to [the reaction to] shark attacks.’

‘I mean, you’ve got more chance of being hit by a car, which is human-made, than being knocked down by a tree. I think the paranoia following that event was a bit extreme and I take it back to a disconnection with nature,’ says Woodburn.

Do the residents of Bendigo really have cause to fear their trees?

‘Any tree that is growing in an urban environment is most likely compromised to some extent,’ says Kemp.

According to him, trees used in urban settings often come from a forest environment, where they would’ve thrived with deep beds of leaf litter. Instead, in Australian towns and cities, the trees deal with a range of stresses, chief among them the weather.

‘Ongoing dry and warm conditions can result in significant stress to a tree and therefore contribute to its decline in its condition and its health,’ says Simon Harrison, the manager of parks and natural reserves with the council.

Furthermore, in urban environments trees do not remain un-tampered with above or below ground.

‘The roots of these trees will travel laterally about three times the distance of their height,’ says Brad Crème, curator of the Bendigo Botanic Gardens.

‘People imagine a tree like a carrot, if you like, but really it’s a root plate, not a root ball, and the roots go out sideways in that top half a metre of soil. It’s really important to put in as large a tree protection zone as possible.’

This also guards against soil compaction which, along with wind, salinity, nutrient loading, water logging, lopping, trimming and age, plays a part in tree health.

‘Trees senesce—that’s a reference to the trees getting old—and like us as humans, they have a lifespan, and certainly a finite one,’ says Harrison.

But how a tree reacts to those stresses varies and is often species specific, according to Mitch Kemp, who, in 25 years as an arboriculturalist has seen his fair share of stressed trees.

‘Some trees, like these planes have done, will start to thin their canopy out—they use it as a defence mechanism to minimise the amount of moisture lost through the canopy and that has to be replaced by the root zone or the tree will die.’

‘In the case of some eucalypts, though, as we know, it would appear that their defence system is to jettison the odd branch, and to drop often large branches in the cases of some species like Red Gums. Unfortunately, that’s one aspect of arboriculture that is not predictable.’

‘It probably just highlights the fact that people have a need to control their environment and when you are trying to combine part of the natural environment with the residential environment or the urban environment it still can’t be made entirely risk free,’ says Kemp.

‘We’re seeing a large increase in requests to undertake [the inspection] process, and we fully understand that, it’s an understandable reaction to what has happened,’ says Harrison, who manages the council’s arboriculture team.

‘But there is no question that the influx of tree work is stretching our resources,’ adds Fuzzard.

Council resources and projects are a hot topic in Bendigo. Remarkably, where other towns and regional centres struggle with slow decline, Bendigo is expanding. With a current population of 104,000, the City of Greater Bendigo is expected to grow to 145,608 people by 2031, a jump of over 31 per cent.

‘We are growing as fast, or faster than, all other regional places in Victoria, and because of that we can’t fit just into the areas already developed,’ says Fuzzard.

The council expects to have to open up green sites around the outskirts of the town, and this will bring further tree management issues to the fore.

With a tree maintenance program already incorporating 98,000 trees, the council’s arborists will get no rest any time soon.

The Victorian Coroner is investigating the exact course of events which led to the tree failure and the death of the child.

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